{"id":595,"date":"2015-02-05T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T13:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=595"},"modified":"2015-02-05T09:00:20","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T13:00:20","slug":"when-a-friend-becomes-the-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/when-a-friend-becomes-the-boss\/","title":{"rendered":"When a Friend Becomes the Boss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[Another type of boundary confusion that is fairly common happens between two friends who were either coworkers at the same level or were friends outside the workplace context and one friend becomes the boss of the other. Kate, a white manager in her twenties in a financial services organization, describes this experience for her:\n\n\n<blockquote>I have two close women friends at work, and one of them\u2014it was announced last week\u2014now reports to me. I feel somewhat upset because I think she\u2019s upset. I feel she used to look to me as a friend, and now it\u2019s like, \u201cOh, gosh. You\u2019re my boss!\u201d She was instant-messaging me the day we found out. She was asking, \u201cDid you know about this?\u201d She came to my house Saturday. I mean, we\u2019re friends! I would never, ever want to upset her by any means. And I was a little bit upset that she thought I would know about something like that and not tell her.<\/blockquote>\n\n\nThere is trouble ahead for these two friends if they do not talk about how this change in their roles at work means their friendship expectations need to change. Kate will not be able to tell her friend everything about confidential information she will have as the boss. If the two women can name and negotiate their expectations for how they will deal with professional topics that come up versus when they are just being friends, they will be able to continue being close friends. If not, the consequences could be disastrous for them professionally or personally or both.\nA recent example of the kind of trouble Kate may be facing with her friend if they don\u2019t learn to manage the changes in their roles comes from a new coaching client in my practice. This client, Stephanie, a white woman in her twenties who is a union executive, hired me as her coach because she was recently promoted and her good friend, a man, now reports to her. He is upset because he was not promoted, and she feels guilty and thinks she must prove her loyalty to him and their friendship.\nShe has shown her loyalty by telling him information she now hears in her new position, and she has also pushed him into the limelight in some situations where she was supposed to be the one there. Her boss is disappointed in her and is now questioning whether she is willing, or able, to step into her new leadership role. He wants her to cut off the friendship with her colleague and distance herself from him. Stephanie feels stuck. Without the intervention of her coach, she might lose her promotion or damage the friendship or both\u2014but neither needs to happen. Later in this chapter, we will take a look at the tool, role hats, that Stephanie is learning to use. But first, let\u2019s consider some other ways that problems can develop when a friend becomes the boss.\n&nbsp;\nAn excerpt from my book,\u00a0<em>New Rules for Women<\/em>, available at Amazon (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/<\/a>).]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[169,207,222,418,612,634],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-excerpt","tag-emotions","tag-feminine-values","tag-friendship-rules","tag-new-rules","tag-women","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}